


Ivory Shadows

by JohnlockAndATardis



Series: Ivory Shadows - Universe [1]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Light Angst, Memories, Reflection, luck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 04:14:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6641050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnlockAndATardis/pseuds/JohnlockAndATardis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex reflects on the times before her life became this, and how she might have ended up this way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ivory Shadows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [remembertowrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/gifts).



     When she was a girl, her father had an miniature statue that he swore was magical. It stood no more than three and a half inches and weighed only a few ounces, but in her small, childish hands it seemed larger than that, larger even than life. Formed entirely of smooth, perfect ivory it was well polished, the carved figure of a little man who wore what almost was a smile behind his thick beard. Alex had never been so fascinated by anything in her life. The tiny figurine, her father had said the first time he’d showed her it, brought good luck. She remembered sitting on the floor beside him in fascination as he told her about how he had been lost one day in a heavy fog that made it impossible to see more than a foot in front of his car, when suddenly the roadway had cleared. He’d come then upon a large clearing around the size of a football field in length and even greater in depth, a flea market of sorts. Thinking he could get directions he had pulled his car over beside the few others scattered there and had stepped out and through the line of flags overtop the dirt-path entrance.

     There had been, as he’d told it, enormous lines of all the strangest sorts of tents, always whimsical in his story and selling fairytale wares. He’d enchanted Alex with his descriptions of a woman in colorful robes that glittered of their own accord, selling fairies which fluttered about in mason jars made of crystal, casting fantastical light patterns. There too, he described to her, had been a man bent over a great green glass orb, wearing a thick black cloak which had cast him into shadows. For a penny only, he would look into the light which it created and tell a person their fortune. Her father, reasonably so, had found himself astounded by these most peculiar creations, as though he had stumbled into a world that was not their own. Her father had, if only for the time, lost thought of what exactly had brought him there, and had let himself be lost to this magical world. He’d traveled through the tents of each marvelous and impossible creature, until he had come to one not like the others.

     It was constructed of the most perfectly thick burgundy fabric, through her father had never been able to name what cloth precisely it was. Layered and lain such that the area within were darkened as though a cave, he admitted to young Alex that he had been hesitant to enter. But a voice from deep in the tent -so deep, he remarked, that it appeared to defy sense- had called him forward. He had obeyed, slipping further into the mystical world. But inside the tent and after a great walk of impossible distance, he had found himself alone. There was no one, nothing to indicate the source of the voice. In fact, all that was to be found was that most peculiar ivory figure, sitting within an open chest as though waiting for him. Alex’s father had never been able to put to word how he knew the figure was meant to be his, but he was quite adamant in the fact that he knew it well indeed. He said to her that the moment his fingers had came in contact with the pale creation, the world seemed to shift, and even the darkness of that tent grew brighter. Indeed, when he stepped out, all had gone! He was on the roadway once more, and he knew his exact way home! Alex thought her father was the bravest man she had ever known for going into the tent, but when she’d informed him of this in her childish, happily certain manner, he had laughed.

     “The real bravery, little bird, is being able to see the truth for what it is. If you can do that, you can do anything.”

    She had not understood then, but she thought she did now.

  
-

  
     Like her mother’s wedding pearls, the figure remained in Alex’s mind as she grew up in a place of reverence. It was an object which was important for reasons she never had to put to word, for it was the creation and proof of another world. Alex, always eager to share what she knew, would often speak to her classmates of the whimsical creation. Many of them were as entranced as she at first, but as she grew older their interest began to wane. By the time she was nine -that age when magic begins to slip from a child’s mind- anyone who knew of Alex Reagan’s ivory carving (which was to say anyone who knew Alex) would say it were as likely to be truly magical as the Tooth Fairy, or Santa. But Alex held tight to her belief in the small figure, no matter what anyone dared say against it. Perhaps it would not prove so important, if not for the way that things began to change about this time in Alex herself.

     It began in the small way to which such things are prone. While in the earliest part of her youth life with Alex had always been hectic -toys would often be noted as having a life much their own, while objects often moved without visible force upon them- these changes were not so much the same. They grew, in fact, to be in some ways violent. A noticeable incident could be recalled by Alex herself, though it would not be for a great time later she would find any importance to the issue. She had been in class when another girl had made of her a comment not in any form pleasant. Just one day later, as the girl was braggingly holding out a glass dolphin brought all the way from Florida by her father (this was quite the deal at the time, for many of them had not ever been so far from home, nor had any gifts as such) the fragile figure had fallen inexplicably from her hands, and shattered into a number of pieces upon the floor. A month or so later when a teacher had been unnecessary cold towards Alex, he came down with a heavy flu that was so severe he was hospitalized. Then there was too the time when a school aid, after scolding Alex and her small circle of friends, fell quite hard upon the floor, twisting her ankle. It was hard not to believe that something strange was afoot, when you looked collectively at the evidence. Though some might have excused it as a coincidence or accidental pattern, little Alex herself seemed to know that something wasn't quite right about her. And so, she did the only thing she thought might help.

    She took her father’s lucky figure.

     Because of its size the figure fit easily enough into her backpack. Alex would hide it there each morning, and at night when she returned from school she placed it back in the mahogany case to which it belonged. It seemed for a while to help. Whatever bad luck might have hung around her disappeared, and for a time all was normal again.

     And then came the school field trip.

     They were going to a beautiful art museum outside of the nearby city. In the back of the glittering white building, acres and acres of botanical gardens stretched out over hills which rolled endlessly into the world past, what seemed to Alex to be the great beyond, a somewhere she would never reach. The young girl found herself instantly enamored with their tour guide, a beautiful woman of around twenty three who smiled kindly at the children and spoke to them as thought they were adults. Her name was Holly, and she had hair like fire and green, forest and moss eyes that lit up her pretty face. Alex followed eagerly behind Holly as the guide showed them through the eras of art, hanging on to her every word like gospel. The group passed through time, from rooms exhibiting pieces of the modern art movements (there was an endless spiral made out of continuously looping pencil shavings, she remembered) to the romanticism era and French impressionists. Alex particularly loved the way that the colors shimmered like a thousand silk scales in the oil paintings, all seen together by careful and delicate brush strokes. When Holly let them wander the large hall of ancient art of their own accord she took great fascination in the strange (sometimes frightening) creatures of mythos which had been born of clay, flames, and determination.

     “Do you know who that is?” Holly had asked Alex as she’d stepped behind the girl, pointing to a long and wide slab with a curious looking dragon upon it. The sign below read Sumerian - Religious Art. Alex had shook her head.

     “That's Tiamat. She’s a goddess,” Holly informed her. Alex’s nose scrunched up beneath her brows. She’d heard of goddesses before - her father had told her about Zeus, and his wife Hera. But those were stories, and in those stories everyone was beautiful.

     “She looks scary,” Alex commented quietly. This only made Holly laugh, as though she were partial to a joke the girl could not understand. But in the end, Holly had nodded her head in agreeance. “I suppose she is, young one. I suppose she is.”

     After a quick lunch in the museum cafeteria, the students were set loose on the gardens. A few of the children with allergies had to stay behind, but Alex found herself happily meandering through the high hedges, as blue jays sang pleasantly overhead. There were more plants than she’d ever thought she could see, a hundred types at least. Sweet smelling poppies like in the Wizard of Oz lined the fields beside a little wooden bridge which tapped pleasantly underneath her feet, and a huge gazebo which stretched upwards into the sky. Behind it there was a pond sparkling in the sun like the planet-shaped marbles she’d seen in the museum. But everything was real here and alive, the orange and white fish flipping their tails in the stone-lined water. Alex stopped to skim her finger over the pond’s surface and found the water agreeable under her touch. She hardly noticed the shadows swelling behind her until a sharp shove forced her into the pond. It was much deeper than she thought, six or seven feet to her four and a half. Alex screamed as she plunged down into the depths, propelled by the momentum of her attacker. She didn't know how to swim, and darkness was beginning to close around around her. Alex fought desperately for the surfaces, straining as she sank lower and lower, deeper and deeper, until something black and inky clasped her hand. It pulled her upwards and out of the water, until she found herself of land, sputtering and coughing, straining for air. When her eyes could see right again, they rose and found Holly, drenched to the bone. 

     “Come on,” Holly said kindly, extending her hand. “Let’s get you back to your class.”

     There were two things at the time Alex didn't notice. The first was her backpack, floating helplessly and alone. The second was that Holly’s eyes had turned black.

  
-

  
    She was in the director’s office at the museum with a towel around her shoulders when she first realized that her bag was gone. The adults had been talking, trying to understand what had happened from the brief description she’d gave them, when Alex suddenly became quite distinctly aware of the lack of weight upon her shoulders. Her little head whipped this way and then that, but the sensible blue and red creation was nowhere to be found. Poor Alex worried at her lip until she found herself in tears, alarming the grown-ups about her. Her teacher knelt before her, quite reasonably worried that the girl might have been more hurt than they'd thought. It took soft tones to urge the truth from her, but when it was uttered they simply didn't understand.

     “Oh, Alex,” Mrs. Prescott admonished as she rose. “I'm certain your mother will get you another backpack. It'll be alright.”

    But some things never are. Her father died four days later.

  
-

  
    Over the years, Alex could forget a lot of things. They were easily pushed to the back of her mind like boxes in the attic containing the sentimental but otherwise useless, making room for that was more current, more pressing. She could easily train herself not to remember the way that water had once sucked up about her and swallowed her whole with its great, ghastly mouth, or how shadows could chase her at night when she was meant to be asleep. The Black Tapes had drug much of that back up, things which she sometimes thinks might have been better left to die. They come back to her most often as she is lying in her bed, not asleep, never asleep, and gnaw hungrily at her conscious.  _You cannot starve us,_ they hiss when she means to shut her eyes.

     She never could.

  
-

  
     She is with Strand when another memory tumbles its way down the stairs of her mind to sit with all its pride at her feet. They are in a small occult shop that is unsettlingly fitting for the town of three thousand which plays host to it, arguing. An anonymous viewer tip had brought her here, and she had dragged Strand along for the ride. Now as she steps past a small shelf of various dried herbs, she is beginning to regret that decision. Every few paces they’ve went Strand had uttered under his breath about witches and charlatans, ruining the mood. Alex, for all its worth, finds the little shop much more delightful than her companion’s current attitude. Thick drapes keep out the sunlight for the most, while crystals hanging off of the windows where they part channel enough of the weak beams to glow in rough rainbows that glitter a she passes. Everything is thick with the scent of incense -one is burning somewhere in the back, she can see the thin wisps of smoke- and beneath that there is a certain earthiness. The shop feels powerful in a way she doesn't have words to properly explain, as though it is tapped into a great magical source that ties together the most basic of elements. Her father would have liked this. The thought strikes melancholy through her, leaving its sour taste in her mouth. She no longer has want for the whimsical.

     “You’re right,” Alex says dryly, interrupting a long stream of complaints he's been uttering since the drive up. Strand states at her in complete and utter shock. “We should go.”

     She turns on her heel and brushes past her colleague before he can stop her to ask a question, or even fully come to understand her words. As she does, her shoulder presses into a display, knocking something to the ground. Alex stoops quickly to retrieve it, and when her fingers unfold around her prize a familiar ivory face smiles from under a heavy beard.

     When she presses it to her lips later that night, she swears she can smell poppies in the spring.


End file.
